► Who’s getting it right?
► Who’s getting it wrong?
► What they have in common
Many famous old car makers have successfully crossed the bridge from the 20th century to the 21st. Many more have failed.
Some luxury makers – Rolls-Royce and Bentley are good examples – have succeeded by promoting their time-honoured values, while ensuring they’re relevant to today’s rich. They highlight their heritage but are not hamstrung by it.
Walk into Rolls-Royce’s Goodwood HQ – bright, airy and modern – and you’ll see a quote from co-founder Henry Royce. Yet the tech is cutting-edge modern, the design edgy. Diverse customers range from royals to rappers, from footballers to fashionistas, pop stars to plutocrats. They have just one thing in common. They’re very rich.
Owner BMW – failed brand custodian of now-dead Rover – has done a fine job of revitalising but not reinventing Rolls-Royce. And if the new cars don’t appeal to you – and I find the Cullinan repulsive – then that’s okay. In the upper echelons of premium marketing, polarisation is fine. Desirable, even.
Similarly, new Bentleys are ‘real’ Bentleys. They are superbly engineered, finely crafted and regularly reference past greats. They also sit comfortably in the complex new world of 21st century luxury, perfectly pitched to customers who are often young and mostly selfmade.
As with Rolls-Royce and Ferrari, its customisation business booms. Owners want individuality, not ubiquity. I suspect that if the Volkswagen Group, successful guardian of Bentley and Lamborghini, had bought Alfa Romeo from Fiat in 2018, then Alfa may be in better shape today.
Under Fiat and now Stellantis, there have been some good Alfas and even one or two very good ones (notably the Giulia Quadrifoglio). But most are degraded by platforms, engines and development budgets that aren’t good enough. Most recent Alfas have been cars of compromise, not conviction. Beautiful design and class-lead-ing driver appeal should surely once again be the priorities. They are qualities that appeal today just as richly as they did yesterday.
It’s the same sorry story at Maserati. Its mainstream model, the Grecale, is a rebadged Alfa Stelvio SUV. Ferrari is a clear role model here. So is Porsche. No maker delivers such a consistent message and such consistently excellent products.
And so is Range Rover. It learnt from former owner BMW, which engineered the seminal 2001 third-generation Range Rover L322. And when it did venture downmarket, its new car (the Evoque) was stand-alone distinctive. Venturing downmarket can be a perfectly viable strategy.
Incongruously, it took a state-owned Chinese company to reinvent MG. Shanghai-based SAIC played to its strengths – low production costs and China’s tech leadership in EVs – to reimagine MG from a maker of cutely styled roadsters into a value-for-money manufacturer of sharply styled EVs. MG is now one of the UK’s fastest growing car brands, and its impressive new Cyberster EV even rekindles the old roadster flame.
Citroën has also reinvented itself downmarket and can be counted as a (modest) Stellantis success. True, it’s declined from the world’s most innovative car company into a name plate of modest technical ambition. Yet its priorities – comfort, practicality, stand-apart style and low price – appeal.